PeakSpan Capital: Redefining Growth Equity with a Risk-Adjusted, Founder-First Approach

In this Dakota Research Interview, Chris Leroy and Alex deMarco sit down with Phil Durr, Co-founder and Managing Partner of PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity firm with $2.6 billion in AUM focused exclusively on bootstrapped business software companies. Phil shares his journey from ROTC and Morgan Stanley to founding PeakSpan in 2015, and explains how the firm's pragmatic, founder-first approach — targeting owner-operators at roughly $6M in revenue — has produced a capital loss ratio of under 2.5% against an industry average exceeding 50%. The conversation covers PeakSpan's differentiated expert network, their AI-powered internal tools, and Phil's conviction that generative AI represents the biggest tailwind for business software since the internet.